O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.

Is There Anybody There? Yes, There Is, Says The Lord

Once we got beyond the basics, the conversation with the woman who’s joined the team of one of our regular events went in an unexpected direction as she described the comfort she’d derived from visiting spiritualist gatherings, and how Christian friends had reacted (she said) with horror. We discussed why someone might want to engage in spiritualist activity and what the problems might be from a Christian point of view. She agreed that there were possibly malign things lurking in the hidden world, but stressed how her experience had been positive. ‘You’re not going to hear this church announcing “And now we’ll have a séance”’, I said, ‘but I’m not shocked’, which I’m not.

Curiously the readings at mass the day after were the consecration of the Temple from 1Kings, and Christ’s critique of the concepts of clean and unclean practices in Mark 7: these led into a reflection about one of my recurring themes, the contrast between two opposed approaches to religious life. The first is that you ring-fence the sense of the divine with rules and structures to prevent it being contaminated by the profane world and eventually eroding altogether; and the second that you use the sense of the divine to find its presence elsewhere. In my own Bible reading in the morning, too, I found the Lord assuring Moses in Exodus 4 ‘I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak’, encouraging a degree of trust in God which I fall short of all too often. ‘He reigns’, I concluded to our small congregation, and if he reigns there is little to fear in the sometimes wayward spiritual practice we encounter in others. One of the issues, in fact, with seeking solace in talking to spirits is that it’s based in a basic lack of trust in God that we are called to grow away from.

If we are critical of what others do, we must surely know that they aren’t simply going to change as a result of something we say. Nobody is going to blink at us and reply ‘You know, I never thought about it like that. I’m going to stop from this point forward’ – although they might, at some point distant from now, shift their ideas and reflect that perhaps we were right. If we don’t expect change in that way, it raises the question of what we’re doing when we react ‘with horror’ at someone else’s behaviour. I think it may be that we fear that if we don’t rebuke the sin, God will blame us for not distancing ourselves from it. The sin will contaminate us and we need to protect ourselves, to signal to God that we want nothing to do with it, to put up a protective barrier between us and it. It’s not the other person that’s uppermost in our minds.

Now, there might well be particular sins that beset us and from which we do need to flee. When Christ says to St Peter ‘get behind me, Satan’, it’s because the Apostle is raising something that’s a genuine temptation for him: it’s actually important. Knowing this is just proper spiritual self-awareness. But that’s not the other sinner’s fault; most of the time it’s not at issue (I have no desire whatever to contact my long-dead relatives); and our words are seldom as much to the point as the Saviour’s.

Goth Walk 35: Chasing the Golden Dawn

It finally happened: my Goth Walk about the history of late 19th- and early-20th century London occultism was originally going to take place as part of my 50th birthday celebrations in May 2020, but of course other events intervened. Even when pandemic conditions allowed us to proceed (and get into the Main Quad of UCL for the last stop), the first date was stymied by a rail strike, the second by a heatwave (Goths die in hot weather, as the joke has it), and yet another rail strike put paid to a third. I began to think it might never happen, but it did, and yesterday. I did think it might have been nine years since the last one, but on checking find it's a mere seven. 

We started at one of our favourite old haunts, the cavernous Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and then wound our way up through Holborn and Fitzrovia. Here we are pictured on the steps of St George's Bloomsbury: some of the stops were directly relevant to the Matherses and other characters and events involved in the story, and some were just convenient places to take a breath, like the rather nice find of Whitfield Gardens off Charlotte Street, culminating in front of the Slade School of Art where Annie Horniman and Moina Mathers - or Mina Bergson as she then was - I suspect rather fell for each other without really recognising what they felt. A tale of odd personalities, beliefs and events, and, to my thinking, some startling talents diverted from their true vocation; which even applies to Aleister Crowley, who by all accounts was a pretty good cook and probably should have run a restaurant rather than an occult society.

We realised how long it had been since some of us had seen one another. Archangel Janet was visiting from Somerset in the company of Lady Wildwood, down from Herts; Sir Goingpostal made it in from Essex; Lady Metalmoomin complimented Janet on her elegant undyed grey: she has now gone undyed herself. Apart from the entertainment and information, I hope, this is of course part of the point of the whole thing. I have some inklings of subjects I might try next: 'Mew Pussy Mew', 'Lud Heat', 'Taking Liberties', 'No Popery', 'Cocktails with Elvira', or 'Tap'd in Bunhill'. That's enough work to keep me going awhile.

Photo by Archangel Janet.

The Fringes of the Weird

My spiritual director’s training incumbent had been a directee of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward (which takes us back quite a way as Fr Ward retired in 1958), and has pondered whether some of RSW’s attitudes have rubbed off on him as a result. He will sometimes solemnly inform me that ‘Fr Somerset Ward would have advised you to take up woodwork’ or the like. It was a surprise that, when we were once discussing a brush I’d had (at second hand, I hasten to stress) with some anomalous spiritual phenomena, he claimed that ‘Somerset Ward was sort of on the outer fringe of that kind of world’ – because there is no trace of it in Ward’s writings that I have ever found.

But – following on from some of my speculations about the Golden Dawn the other week – I discover that there is a certain family connection between that outré ritual magicking and Fr Ward’s sober English mysticism. I already knew that there were clergy involved in the Golden Dawn, most notably Revd William Ayton, who married the G.D.’s Supreme Magus Samuel MacGregor Mathers to his formidable wife Moina Bergson, and who, so WB Yeats alleged, lived in perpetual terror of his bishop discovering the alchemical laboratory in his cellar. However, I hadn’t quite twigged how one of the Golden Dawn’s offshoots, the Stella Matutina, was explicitly Christian in focus. Adherents of other religions could be members of the S.M., but whereas the parent order had thought of Christianity as one reflection of an overarching esoteric tradition, the Stella Matutina saw the occult work as an aspect of Christianity. As the head of the order, Robert Felkin, stated, the suggestion was that in addition to the open, exoteric doctrines of the Church, Jesus had communicated to the disciples secret techniques of spiritual working which the occult world had now rediscovered for the benefit of the human race. We now know that what various writers have hinted was indeed actually the case, that several brothers of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield were members of the S.M., including Timothy Rees who eventually became Bishop of Llandaff and Frank Selwyn Bennett who was eventually Dean of Chester, as was – perhaps most surprisingly – the redoubtable Fr Alban Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross. The old suggestion that there was a link between clergy who were members of the Stella Matutina and the founding of the Guild of St Raphael, which revived the healing ministry within the Anglican Church, seems to be true. When Felkin set up the branch of his Order in New Zealand – the Smaragdus-Thalasses Temple – not one bishop but several ended up as members, joining while they were bishops. That future mystical writer Evelyn Underhill was part of this was already well known, but the extent of clerical involvement is news.

We all know this because of a 2009 PhD Exeter PhD thesis by one Anthony Fuller, which traces particularly the links between Anglo-Catholics and these occult organisations. As Mr (I presume now Dr) Fuller points out, at the time the Community of the Resurrection wasn’t that large, and given that members of the Stella Matutina had to carry out a whole series of practical magical exercises and even take exams to advance in the order, its Superior, Fr Walter Frere – later Bishop of Truro – must have known what they were doing and, like them, seen no necessary contradiction between such occult antics and Christian orthodoxy, however weird we might find it now. Dr Fuller’s most striking claim is that some aspects of the original Golden Dawn’s ways of doing things were transferred from the Society of the Holy Cross – founded thirty years earlier – probably via CM Davies, an Anglican priest who had founded the SSC along with Fr Charles Lowder and others, but then renounced his orders. He wasn’t actually an adept of the G.D., but his wife was and he organised his own group for mystical Christian meditation, the Guild of the Holy Spirit. A bold and unprovable speculation; but not an unreasonable one.

So what of Fr Somerset Ward – neither, clearly, an occultist, nor even really an Anglo-Catholic (though definitely a Catholic Anglican)? His interest was in the English mystical tradition of the Middle Ages – the tradition of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Mother Julian, all of whom were being rediscovered by Anglican Churchpeople in the later 1800s. Ordained in London in 1896 – at exactly the same time that MacGregor Mathers was at his height – Ward was part of a movement to develop a deeper, more serious spiritual life among Christians. He looked back to the Middle Ages for clues as how to do it, how to recover a tradition of spiritual working which was more than just Bible reading and creed-reciting and which was not a million miles from the sacramentalism championed by the first couple of generations of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. Others, conversely, delved into more esoteric ways of doing things to achieve exactly the same. In a sardonic mood we might ascribe the occult’s appeal to some Anglo-Catholics to dressing-up and ritual complexity, but we could read it more generously as a reflection of a genuine religious instinct: a desire to go deeper into God, even (as in the Guild of St Raphael and the experiences of Agnes Sanford) to see the most altruistic and hopeful of one’s prayers answered, prayers for healing and reconciliation. Fr Somerset Ward appears in stone on the west front of Guildford Cathedral, and just feet away from him is Evelyn Underhill, who was definitely a member of the Stella Matutina and – so Golden Dawn writer Ithell Colquhoun wondered – whose vision that led to her conversion may have been sparked off by G.D. techniques.

AC Fuller states (though without any source) that an Anglican episcopal enquiry about the year 1939 resulted in an instruction that no ordained person should be a member of any occult society. This would have been five years after Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out was serialized in the Daily Mail and by then Middle England might have been very familiar with the motif of the clerical diabolist operating under the cover of collar and cassock. If this enquiry did actually happen (and I can’t uncover any actual evidence it did) the Anglican hierarchy would have realised, if they didn’t already know, that the picture wasn’t completely removed from the truth. In 1946 that odd figure Fr Lionel Smithett Lewis, vicar of Glastonbury, carried out the funeral service for Dion Fortune, who had always thought of herself as a Christian; by then, occultism wasn’t just a neutral spiritual technique. The ‘fringes’ of that world were far more clearly defined.

Dawns, Golden and False

Six years ago I wrote a series of posts about the resemblances between the unconventional Christian healing ministry of Agnes Sanford and the occult practice of Dion Fortune - possibly something it is quite improper for me to take an interest in, but it does raise intriguing questions about orthodox Christianity. I'm thinking around this area again as I may be doing another Goth Walk, as I have long, long promised, about the 'occult societies of Victorian London'. To be honest, there's only one, the Golden Dawn, unless you count the GD's various offshoots and splinters. You can find shadowy references to other stuff around the same time, but nothing very definite.

In the course of this I read Sword of Wisdom by Ithell Colquhoun, a mid-twentieth-century Surrealist artist who was a fierce partisan of Samuel and Moina Mathers, the 'Supreme Magus' of the Golden Dawn and his redoubtable wife. Colquhoun never met either of them, only joining the Alpha et Omega - the society composed of Mathers loyalists left after the Golden Dawn's great disruption at the turn of the century - in 1928 when it was run by Isabel Morgan Boyd, Moina Mathers's decreed successor; at that time she was a student at the Slade School of Art, where Moina had been enrolled nearly fifty years before. It's clear how Colquhoun identified with them both. In her book, published in 1975, she's scathing in differing degrees about those who left the true fold and proved disloyal to her idols even where, as with WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, she recognises their abilities. They have cut themselves off from the true stream of hidden truth, she avers, and there lies an interesting parallel with the world I normally move in.

Now, central to the idea of the Golden Dawn were the Secret Chiefs. It was unclear who they were supposed to be; Mathers came to believe that they were 'human and living on this earth, but possessing terrible superhuman powers'. In its early years the Golden Dawn used a series of rituals and symbolism derived from the 'Cipher Manuscripts' which had come into the hands of one of the founders, William Wynn Westcott, and which Mathers had translated; they had contained the address of an obscure German occultist, one Fraulein Sprengel, who, when contacted by Westcott, communicated to the British esotericists the instructions of the Secret Chiefs, whoever they were. But Sprengel apparently died in 1890 and two years later Mathers announced that he had made contact with the Chiefs himself, marking a shift in the Order's emphasis towards practical magic, astral projection, clairvoyance, and that sort of thing. As the Golden Dawn fell apart around 1900 Mathers alleged that Westcott had made it all up, to the horror of the membership, but far from feeling that this undermined his own authority in any way he clearly felt he was vindicated by his separate contact with the occult powers that were directing him. 

Did Mathers believe all this? I hadn't read his 'Manifesto' until a couple of days ago, issued to all members of the Second Order of the GD in the 1890s; in this he states that the Chiefs communicated all the rituals of the Order by clairvoyance, divination, and occasionally audible voices which both he and Moina heard. It reads like the work of someone who is capable of being deluded by his own enthusiasm, but not necessary an obvious fake or nutcase, so perhaps he did. Some GD enthusiasts are content to point to the practical usefulness of the Order's techniques and argue that whether it actually came from some outer force or just from Mathers's fertile imagination doesn't matter. Ithell Colquhoun disagrees, arguing that Mathers was the Chiefs' chosen leader and nobody could break with him without also cutting themselves off from the true source of magical power:

You cannot lightly reject their choice ... Once made it cannot be switched to some other Conductor by human caprice.

The key question, Colquhoun insists, is whether you accept the reality of the Secret Chiefs. If they are genuine, if they exist in any commonly-accepted sense as beings with wills and initiative, then

dissidents are without sanction from the initiatic chain and will suffer, sooner or later, from psychic aetiolation.

You can see what's going on here: it's an occultist's version of the Apostolic Succession. Dissident occult societies are to the Golden Dawn what Protestant denominations are to the Catholic Church: they may do worthwhile and interesting things but essentially they are sundered from the divine electricity which keeps things going and will, ultimately, wither. Now, this is a caricature of Apostolic Succession, but I was intrigued to see the same idea cropping up in this context. 

Christian origins, too, are, as we know, nothing if not mysterious and the exact mix of reality and distortion can be argued about infinitely by Biblical and other scholars. Apostolic Succession is a way of getting around the uncertainty, but as Fr Couratin said once, it's less a matter of 'hands on heads than of bums on thrones' - that is, what matters is not the technical details of the consecration of one bishop by another in an unbroken sequence back to the apostles, but the role of the bishops in formulating the communities of believers in which the truth of the Gospel is settled, explored and meditated on. In occult terms, if the angels will forgive the analogy, we are more with Dion Fortune than with Ithell Colquhoun.

Signs & Wonders - 4

The final chunk of my complicated reflections on the lives of a Christian and an occult practitioner.

Anyone who prays accepts that part of the business of prayer is the effect it has on the one who does it: thus Christians say that prayer is less about telling God what you want than about listening to him, learning to align one's will with his. This is of course nothing less than the truth; but putting all the emphasis in this direction turns away in some discomfort, perhaps, from those Scriptural insistences that prayer is also supposed to make very concrete things happen, or at least play a role in them happening. ‘The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective', says St James, ‘the prayer will make the sick person well.’ ‘If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer’, says Jesus quite baldly. Generations of Christians have been driven to angst and anguish by trying to reconcile such statements with the apparent deafness of Heaven to what they pray themselves.  

People, by and large, want to help, want to be able to do something practical for others. What originally propelled Dion Fortune towards occultism – strange though this might seem to those of us with a rationalist frame of mind – was the feeling that the psychotherapeutic techniques in which she was trained were actually inadequate to help her patients, and something was needed which took a rounder view of the human person and its mental components. Throughout the history of the Society of the Inner Light there was a persistent desire, never fulfilled, to develop something along the lines of an occult healing centre that would combine a variety of therapeutic techniques to heal, and that sometimes this would include physical as well as mental disorders. One of the Higher Plane teachers who regularly contacted the Society, known as ‘the Master of Medicine’, would occasionally remind the members of this aspect of the work. Dion Fortune and some of the adepts did indeed deal with individuals and their problems on this basis, but the plan for a more corporate healing centre never materialised. For Agnes Sanford, the whole impetus of her ministry came from the experience of healing and being healed.

The similarities between the two – the focus on visualisation and mental training, for instance – are striking. Furthermore, although the occultist may seem to concentrate more on an internal journey towards adept-ship which doesn't necessarily have any obvious purpose beyond the person concerned, it’s clear that Dion Fortune, at least, intended the purified soul to be more useful to their fellow beings rather than just enjoying some individualistic communion with eternal reality. Agnes Sanford’s teaching, obviously, was even more concentrated on discovering ways, often very old ways, of ‘clearing’ the human will to be more open to the will and power of God.

If both spiritual disciplines do seem able, at some level, to help prayer produce sensible effects, an important question arises for Christians: what’s happening? The fact that Dion Fortune’s first mentor in the occult world, Theodore Moriarty, was an accomplished exorcist, raises the issue in a rather acute form. Remember how Jesus is challenged about this very matter, accused of ‘casting out demons by the prince of demons’, and responds to the religious authorities, ‘then by whom do your sons cast them out?’ pointing out further that if Satan is casting out devils his end can’t be far away. Christians who might want to argue that good supernormal works wrought by non- (or heterodox) Christians are in fact delusions of dark spiritual powers have to cope with the Church’s ancient and Biblical insistence that those powers cannot do anything wholesome and good, except by accident. You can’t draw fresh water from a salty spring, states St James; by their fruits you shall recognise them, says Jesus.

Assuming this is not all the purest nonsense, there seem to be two possibilities. First, that there is some sort of innate spiritual power in human beings which can be activated and energised by certain techniques, whether they are framed within a Christian or an occult context, or something entirely different. Second, that God responds with generosity to prayers offered to him with compassion, without necessarily insisting very much on the person offering them having the correct belief structure. The first omits God and can never form the basis of a Christian approach to the matter;  the second leaves the initiative with God; but still unsettles Christian assumptions about their own specialness. It would make God more open-minded, perhaps, than we might be comfortable with, or can afford to be.

Signs and Wonders - 3

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Gareth Knight's book about Dion Fortune introduced me rather helpfully to the way an occult society operates. He refers repeatedly to the 'work' the Society of the Inner Light did, and one might wonder what that work actually consisted of. I was sufficiently intrigued to try to express it thus.

The initiative is held to come from the Masters (Hidden or Secret or something of that ilk) who have died but are keen to encourage the spiritual development of humankind. They reside above the wavy line on this diagram. The occult society draws inspiration from the broader occult tradition (the scroll) but also directly from the Masters via the medium - in this case, Dion Fortune herself. The Society's members meditate on the trance communications and the tradition, and together develop a system of imagery and practice (the Qabalah symbol on the right) which in turn feeds back into the meditative cycle, providing a means for the society's adepts to interpret and improve their lives. 

As far as the Inner Light was concerned, the communications with the Masters tended to take a back seat as time went on, even while Dion Fortune was still alive. There were three, in the main: Lord Erskine, as mentioned previously, Socrates, and a former First War officer called David Carstairs who had a disconcertingly chirpy manner and in latter years even dictated a rather well-received stage play. After Dion Fortune died, the Masters had less and less to say, or perhaps the adepts spoke to them less; at any rate, mediumship became of progressively dwindling importance and, as Gareth Knight says, under successive mediums 'the type of trance seemed very light, and a condition that was entered and left with considerable facility'. Am I right in detecting something of an edge to this statement?

Well, this is all somewhat extra vires to my main interest, but intriguing nonetheless. 

Signs and Wonders - 2

The other book that I managed finally to take down from the shelf and read - mainly in Paris - is Gareth Knight's Dion Fortune and the Inner Light. Having bought some book or other about holy wells many years ago, for some time I was regularly sent a catalogue from an esoteric bookseller in Glastonbury (almost inevitably) and must have bought it from that.

Dion Fortune - or Violet Firth to use her birth name - was, like Agnes Sanford, a sceptical and questioning presence within the tradition in which she stood. Violet came from a Christian Science background, significantly in view of her later opinions. She originally pursued a career in agricultural science, researching the properties and qualities of soya during World War One (and remaining something of an evangelist for its virtues), before moving into psychotherapy. It was a growing awareness in her mid-20s of the apparent inability of psychotherapeutic techniques actually to help people that propelled her towards occultism, as a more holistic way of looking at psychological and spiritual problems.

She joined, not the original Order of the Golden Dawn, but the Alpha Et Omega, its 'official' offshoot headed by Moina Mathers, widow of the Golden Dawn's founder. She and Mrs Mathers later fell out, and Fortune was expelled for having 'incorrect inner sigils in her aura' - an accusation she confessed she didn't even understand. Heavily influenced by the somewhat mysterious occultist and exorcist Theodore Moriarty, Fortune eventually set up her own organisation, which eventually became the Society of the Inner Light. It made use of the Golden Dawn's symbolic system but moved away from its customs of secrecy and hierarchy. Dion Fortune was, in general, a remarkably affable and pacific person, which may help to explain why the Society still survives. It doesn't talk much these days about contacting the Secret Masters on the Higher Planes, though some of that may well go on, and majors instead on teaching meditation techniques.

Dion Fortune's Christian Science upbringing - which was, after all, Christian, albeit of a heretical variety - lingered in her occult work. She headed the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society for a time, and in fact left the T.S. over its promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti as the coming World Teacher - 'for us in the West', she insisted, 'the Master of Masters is Jesus of Nazareth'; the Inner Light maintained for years a Guild of the Master Jesus which held services on Sunday mornings to cater for members of the Society who regarded themselves as Christians. Notwithstanding the very clear Biblical warnings against consulting spirits, the Secret Masters who guided the Society through Dion Fortune's mediumship tended to strengthen the Christian allegiance of the group, especially the Master who identified himself as the 18th- and 19th-century lawyer Lord Erskine (and who was rather stern about the matter) and even, strange though it might seem, Socrates. On her death in 1946, Dion Fortune was buried in an Anglican funeral service conducted by that other rather odd character, the then Vicar of Glastonbury, Lionel Smithett Lewis.

Dion Fortune and the Inner Light has bits which are, as reading, hard to take, mainly the lengthy transcripts of trance communications from the Masters, but it gave me an interesting insight into the development and practice of an occult society. I will talk about this on future occasions, as well as the similarities with and differences from the more thoroughly Christian charismatic tradition represented by Agnes Sanford.